LCC Website Branding
Project Details
The redesign of the website for The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges (LCC, since rebranded as The Claremont Colleges Library, CCL) followed a path similar to that for the later TCCS (The Claremont Colleges Services) website redesign, described elsewhere.
Although not as involved as that later project—for example, no CMS (content management system) migration was involved—the projects were similar in that the Libraries, as an organization within TCCS (then called CUC, Claremont University Consortium), served The Claremont Colleges and were independent of them. Thus, its branding needed to be independent of them. Not an easy feat considering that among them the Colleges had used up virtually all conceivable color schemes: red (Claremont Graduate University and Claremont McKenna College), green (Scripps College), blue (Pomona College and Keck Graduate Institute), gold (Harvey Mudd College), and orange (Pitzer College).
Finding Neutral Ground
An old postcard in the Honnold/Mudd Library’s Special Collections department offered a way forward. Being a vintage picture of Claremont, California, and not focusing on any one college, the image provided a perfect background for the website’s header.
Deriving a Color Palette
The postcard also provided a color palette. Although green was the color of Scripps College, the postcard provided sufficiently different shades of green for us to pick one different from “Scripps’s green.” Now having green as our primary color, we chose a complementary shade of lavender as our secondary color. And the red that appears on a couple buildings in the postcard provided a third accent color.
Finishing Touches
Grayed-out portions of the postcard appeared as background images: the mountains at the top of the page, and the village in the lower left.
Project Gallery
Building a color palette for the Claremont Colleges Library required finding an inspirational anchor, in this case an old postcard; picking key colors in it; and deriving a full palette from those colors
